LTTE: Road building gets lion's share; transit gets squat (Wisconsin)

[marmar]

from The Capital Times



James Rowen: Road building gets lion's share; transit gets squat
James Rowen — 12/26/2007 7:14 am

John Norquist, transit advocate and former Milwaukee mayor for whom I worked from 1996 to 2004, used to joke that balanced transportation in Wisconsin meant "half asphalt, half concrete."

The line got a lot of laughs, but regrettably it's a true description of transportation spending in our state, and certainly in southeastern Wisconsin, where three current examples illustrate the primacy of road building to the detriment of transit services.

1. Waukesha and Milwaukee county governments have failed to come to a cost-sharing agreement to save Route 9, a Milwaukee County bus line that carries about 70 workers daily from Milwaukee to their jobs in Waukesha County.

The Route 9 problem arose because Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas had removed its $100,000 funding from his 2008 budget.

Granted that 70 riders a day is not an overwhelming number, but in an area with high employment, and a widening geographic separation between Milwaukee workers and suburban job availability, it's been a shock to see that neither local government nor the state Department of Transportation could find the dollars to save Route 9.

Not the role of state government, you say, to step in with state dollars and resolve what is essentially a local transportation issue?

Well, consider the next example, which comes from much the same area.

2. An upscale shopping mall is on the drawing board at the 1,500-acre planned community in western Waukesha County called Pabst Farms, at the outskirts of the city of Oconomowoc.

Someone forgot to pencil in an interchange off I-94 so shoppers could drive to the site, so in a matter of weeks this fall -- warp-speed for bureaucracies -- Waukesha County, the city of Oconomowoc, the state Transportation Department and the mall developer all pledged money toward the interchange's $25 million price tag.

The state will put in $21.9 million, Waukesha County found $1.75 million in unexpended funds, and the developer and the city offered the rest.

Even though details of the mall's design and makeup are now unsettled, the governments are still pledging their shares -- but couldn't find the relative pittance of $100,000 for Route 9.

Maybe the workers are supposed to walk from Milwaukee, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps at the same time. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/guest/index.php?ntid=263916

[nxylas]

1. The comments were very depressing

James Rowen writes that "Highway advocates treat budgets as entitlements" and, lo and behold, the comments underneath the article are filled with highway advocates doing just that.